Almost every semester when I start a new education class, I think "I'm definitely going to use this as a way to start my classroom". Only problem is that I have no idea what I will be teaching, making it hard to come up with a "connective" activity for the first day of class. I do know one thing, I will have "warm-ups" on the board everyday for students to begin as soon as they enter the classroom, and the first day is no exception. The first warm-up will be something relating to the students' lives and their enjoyments outside of the classroom. What I liked about the Tchudi and Mitchell article was the idea of synergy in the classroom. It's exactly the word I would use to describe how I want my classroom to feel starting from the first day; hence why I will have almost all group activities for the first day of class.
After the warm-up, I could see myself using the "fill-in the blank" questions about how the students react to the topics in school. I then find that my thoughts drift back to middle school where in the classrooms our teacher would let us do something to get to know each other (having almost nothing to do with the topics of class). I do believe I will be doing some sort of group/physical activity so that the students feel more at ease with my classroom. Now if I'm teaching social studies, I could see myself doing the "silhouettes" activity from Chapter 5 so that I may relate it back to people and culture. If I will be teaching language arts, the assessing the anthology would be a fun interactive way to get students looking at their materials in a different light. Either way, I definitely want to through in a group activity somewhere in between that has the students working together entirely.
August 23, 2012
Almost every semester when I start a new education class, I think "I'm definitely going to use this as a way to start my classroom". Only problem is that I have no idea what I will be teaching, making it hard to come up with a "connective" activity for the first day of class. I do know one thing, I will have "warm-ups" on the board everyday for students to begin as soon as they enter the classroom, and the first day is no exception. The first warm-up will be something relating to the students' lives and their enjoyments outside of the classroom. What I liked about the Tchudi and Mitchell article was the idea of synergy in the classroom. It's exactly the word I would use to describe how I want my classroom to feel starting from the first day; hence why I will have almost all group activities for the first day of class.
After the warm-up, I could see myself using the "fill-in the blank" questions about how the students react to the topics in school. I then find that my thoughts drift back to middle school where in the classrooms our teacher would let us do something to get to know each other (having almost nothing to do with the topics of class). I do believe I will be doing some sort of group/physical activity so that the students feel more at ease with my classroom. Now if I'm teaching social studies, I could see myself doing the "silhouettes" activity from Chapter 5 so that I may relate it back to people and culture. If I will be teaching language arts, the assessing the anthology would be a fun interactive way to get students looking at their materials in a different light. Either way, I definitely want to through in a group activity somewhere in between that has the students working together entirely.